Dec 112009
This is my Gamer Chili recipe — a modified version of one that Rob Donoghue (there he is again!) threw at me earlier this decade. It got the “Gamer Chili” moniker for being very easy to throw together the morning before a game, and with a big enough crock pot (I usually do a double batch, but my slow-cooker is pretty high capacity), it can easily feed a table of 6-8 hungry gamers. I may have posted it somewhere before, but it’s always good to get out there. Continue reading »
Dec 072009
Farscape probably wins my award for the best science fiction series I’ve seen in the last couple decades. It doesn’t win this because its special effects are particular greater than any other show out there (sometimes they’re decidedly average), or because its actors are unusually talented (though they have some hefty chops). It’s because the stories and environment the show presented were so full freakin’ throttle. Farscape rarely bothered to slow down and explain itself. The premise flew up your nose at light speed, genuinely alien aliens landed on your face, and it never, ever turned a soft edge towards you on impact when it could smack you with something hard. As a GM, Farscape taught me how to go for the pain and for the fun at the same time, and how to get everyone’s pulse racing right out the gate and never let up. If you hear Rob talk about how I run a game, Farscape is how. If you leave the other side of a Don’t Rest Your Head game panting and frantic and exhausted and satisfied, it’s because I wrote that game to feel like I GM it, and I GM games so they feel like Farscape did.
Anyway.
The entire flippin’ series is on sale at Amazon right now for less than $60, which is about 40% of the regular price. You should maybe really urgently buy it, or get it for someone this Christmas.
Dec 072009
There are a lot of good things I could say (and have said) about Diaspora. I liked it enough that I offered to run the publication of it for VSCA, the current publisher, if they wanted to transition off of Lulu (which at least as of a couple weeks ago looks like it might have been a good idea), taking a modest percentage for Evil Hat & getting the title out to more sales venues. It’s Fate, and it excites me, so I’m happy to make that sort of offer.
That’s not to say the game is without its warts. The text does fall into self-congratulation here and there, and designers’ notes are swirled together with main text instead of offset in some way. That reads fine for me, but I know some readers encounter such things as turbulence. But the reason I decided to back off of the publication pursuit was that VSCA isn’t offering a PDF of Diaspora and won’t be for a while, while Evil Hat is strongly, even passionately, committed to offering PDF with its products. VSCA also had a few well-founded reasons of their own to decline, so this wasn’t the sole dealkiller; all amicably handled.
Some background here: Diaspora was a very deliberately designed artifact as books go. Brad has talked about this on his blog (see the prior link). It was designed to be a book, which means there’s a philosophical disconnect for VSCA to provide a PDF of the book’s interior as the PDF product. If they’re going to offer a PDF, they’re going to create a deliberately-designed-as-a-PDF PDF. I get that philosophy, and I respect it, even though I know that it puts a vast wedge between delivering the print product and delivering the PDF (if indeed the PDF would be delivered at all). But it really lives in a different headspace from where I do, whether we’re talking about the synergy between a print and a PDF product, a stand-alone PDF product, or the service relationship between publisher and customer. I’ll expand on this.
Dec 042009
So back in late October, I jumped in on a thread on RPG.net comparing Starblazer Adventures and Diaspora. I got more than a little colorful with my praise of Diaspora, but before I got there I felt I had to give some background as to why I found myself personally favoring Diaspora over Starblazer Adventures. Now, at least one person has gotten ridiculously exercised over that (and come on: it’s RPG.net, people), and I’ve seen it characterized as anything from “damning with faint praise” to the old RPG.net standby of criticizing the critic instead of the critique, calling my post “unprofessional”. Whee! The internet — it’s made for hating!
But the internet’s also made for missing the freakin’ point. I was unburdening myself there so anyone reading it could (if they chose to) understand the intense bias I bring to any evaluation of those two products side by side. I was saying as best and clearly and honestly as I could that I can’t make a fair comparison. The thread was specifically about comparisons, after all — I did what I could do make them, but it was a tainted effort from the start, and I said as much. At the end of the day, I got to see the sausage made with Starblazer Adventures, and that is never a pretty thing. Diaspora on the other hand may as well have sprung fully-formed from the forehead of Brad Murray & crew. Here’s what I’m saying: because I got to see the sausage get made, I can’t look at it with the same perspective that I’d bring to any other game book out there (like Diaspora, among hundreds of others). It’s not even a case of trying to compare apples to oranges. It’s a case of comparing apples to the life and times of an orange farmer (i.e., “ooh! yummy apple!” to “holy crap that orange was brought about through a lot of hard brutal work and praying to the gods that an extra cold winter won’t come along and destroy the entire crop!”).
And as for the “unprofessional” thing, well, it was my sense of professionalism that’s why I sat on saying anything about Starblazer for a year and a half. I won’t — and shouldn’t — apologize for the full disclosure nature of the post, either; full disclosure and maximum transparency are key elements of who I am on the ‘net, and at the end of the day I couldn’t have gotten into that conversation in the first place without laying everything in my head on the table. At this point in my life I’m just wired that way. It’s why I disclose as much information as I do about Evil Hat, why the Dresden Files RPG website talks at great length about why the project has taken so damned long, and so on. If that kind of transparency doesn’t fit into your vision of what a professional is, then I’m not one, and I wouldn’t want to be.
Back to Starblazer Adventures. Another way the point’s been missed regarding Starblazer is thinking that for some reason I don’t like the game. But I do, and I even said so in that post:
“I like SBA a lot — but in large part due to my history with it, I don’t *love* it.”
But so what if I don’t love it? There are very few games that I love, and I’ll tell you right now that none of them are ones I’ve worked on. I like a great many more than I love, I can assure you. I don’t love a lot of the stuff that’s done with the Storyteller system from White Wolf, but I like the hell out of a lot of it. Changeling: The Lost rightly rocked my socks, and so on. (In case the point’s being missed there, I’m saying that something I “like, but don’t love” still has the power to rock my socks. Therefore sock-rocking is not of limits for Starblazer either!)
Still, I can see why my efforts to be clear and open about my biases might come off as damning Starblazer Adventures with faint praise. So here’s a short list of a few reasons why Starblazer Adventures is gunning for your socks with a plasma blaster set to fully-automatic rocking. Continue reading »
Fred Hicks is a dad, a gamer, and a game publisher. He runs 
